What do you get the person who has everything? These days of instant gratification ensure that when shopping for your loved ones you will be certain to get them something that they went out and bought for themselves on Black Friday or Cyber Monday because...

Reclusive novelist and short story writer J. D. Salinger died on Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at the age of 91. "Catcher in the Rye" the penultimate novel of teen angst -- first published in 1951 -- has sold 65 million copies worldwide and over...

What a delicious piece of fiction! A truly precocious eleven year old girl delves into the gory details of a murder in her family's cucumber patch with the zeal and insight of Sherlock Holmes. The year is 1950 and Flavia de Luce lives in a giant manor...

Because of the Indiana connection, I've always been somewhat interested in John Dillinger. But it was only after watching Johnny Depp bring the notorious bankrobber to life in his latest flick , that I decided to check out the details. This book was...

Prolific and beloved mystery/suspense author Robert B. Parker died suddenly on Monday, January 18. He was at his desk working on his latest Spenser novel. Parker actually wrote three different series, as well as a number of unrelated titles, but his most...

I've been a Hunter S. Thompson fan since I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas back in college in 1973. The completely drug-soaked, high speed narration of a trip to Las Vega in search of "the American Dream," was a breakthrough, a new style...

In the past few weeks since my last blog post, I have been on a chick-lit rampage. I have been speed-reading through recent releases like I don't have a hundred other things to do. Laundry piled up, kitchen didn't get cleaned, and packing for...

This very readable and lavishly illustrated book is a survey of libraries, from the earliest gatherings of clay tablets in the library at Nineveh to the present grandeur of the Library of Congress. It is full of the characters of library history as well...

When I went home a little while back, I saw a copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in my little sister's room. Feeling a bit nostalgic, I went home and started reading the battered copy on my bookshelf. I don't know how many times I have read this...

Anyone familiar with John Krakauer's book Under the Banner of Heaven will be familiar with the polygamous, Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS). In that book Krakauer recounts how religious polygamy was often used as a cover for pedophilia...

The Ripest Moments is a simple pleasure to read. While reading this memoir of growing up in the 40s and 50s in Jasper and rural Dubois County, Indiana, I found myself reminded over and over again of my own childhood in northern Indiana, and the cousins...

While I find it appalling on so many levels that we even need a such a book as this in the 21st Century US, I'm glad that I had the chance to read this. Torture is divided into two sections, the first being about international torture - it's history...

It is sometimes hard to believe that I graduated from USI over five years ago. That may seem like no time at all for some people, but sometimes I still feel like I am 21 again. Sometimes I forget that I am a "grown-up" with a "grown-up"...

In September of 1965 Lorree Rackstraw was a graduate student in her second year at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, apprehensive about her new teacher, a relatively unknown writer named Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut had published just three books: The Sirens...

If you read and enjoyed Ruiz's international bestseller " Shadow of the Wind ," you should probably read his newest (and related) novel " The Angel's Game ." This is the second in a series of novels that will all link back...